Tempered By The Battle's Heat
by tielan
Summary: Twenty years of friendship, and a fire that had come dangerously close to putting it out. John Sheppard and Cameron Mitchell friendship.


**NOTES**: Written for the John/Cam Thing-A-Thon back in January 2009. The prompt was for an AU. It's gen, not slash, although you could probably read slash into it if you tend that way.

**Tempered By The Battle's Heat**

--

Fire roared above and before them, mindless and hungry.

It slicked its way across the floors, melting lino and crisping wood, pooling where it found fuel and sending up a steady stream of smoke that hung in the air, clouding the vision and choking the breath.

Cameron stepped back from the remnants of the broken-down door, taking the opportunity to hand the axe off to someone else along the line. "Ladies first," he told John through their earpieces.

"Age before beauty," John responded. He raised his voice, the resonance of it slightly hoarse from the smoke. "McKay says the structure's mostly brick and steel, but that's no reason not to be careful going in. Stay in twos, check for vics, then get the hell out. Pegasus Engine Four is working to keep the flames down so we can run a life-signs check, but don't takes risks. Let's do this without loss of life, boys!"

There were at least six engines on site - Cheyenne Engines One, Five, and Seven, and Pegasus Engines Two, Four, and Five. Pete Mitchell (no relation to Cam) High sat right on the border of Cheyenne and Pegasus counties and serviced students from both regions. Hell, Cam had been a student at it once, a very long time ago.

He'd been back plenty of times since - to give lectures about fire, for firefighting demos, to put out a fire in one of the science labs - hell, once he'd come here to get a kid out of a shed roof after the boy climbed up to fetch a ball and took a misstep to his armpits in slate.

But this? This was total and complete destruction - wanton, wilful, devastating.

Cam took a deep breath and walked into the belly of the beast.

If it had been bad outside, it was worse inside. Heat that blistered his cheeks, smoke that stung his eyes, and the constant crackling, roaring reminder that the fire was all around him and could take his life at any moment.

Behind him, others split off down the corridors.

"Picked ones familiar with the layout," John said behind him. "We're checking the west wing."

Cam strode up to one of the fire extinguishers at the bottom of the flight of stairs leading up to the second floor and the west wing of the main school building. Second floor was going to be a nightmare - the smoke and heat would be twice as bad upstairs as down - but this was the job. "Think we'll find President Bartlett in all this?"

John had hold of the second fire extinguisher and was spraying at the flames trailing up the stairs. "If we do, I get dibs dating Donna."

"Nice alliteration, but you assume she'd _want_ to date you."

"What woman _wouldn't _want to date me?"

"Do ex-wives count?" Five years ago, Cameron would have hesitated to mention it. These days, he knew his friend was over the wife who'd walked out on him after he'd missed one too many booze-and-schmooze functions for her high-powered law firm.

"Ouch," but John didn't sound fazed as they started up the stairs - concrete but with a suspicious slickness beneath the sooty residue of the fire.

"Never let it be said that I don't fight dirty when the occasion warrants it," said Cam, squinting upwards, trying to pierce through the haze and darkness and see what was going on ahead of them. He glanced back down at the floor, and scraped it with his boot toe. "Gas."

"Yeah, I saw." John jerked his head, indicating an open window. "Chimney draw."

"Torched by a pro," Cam muttered as he swept the stairs with the extinguisher to clear them a path up to the second level of the school. This wasn't a teenaged prank, this was someone who knew what they were doing and had set everything up to burn.

They had an experienced arsonist on their hands.

--

After a night spent in the bowels of hell, the cool sluice of the water over his skin was divine. Cameron Mitchell wasn't prissy, but damn it felt good to be clean after a fire - grit and ash and smoke and dust all scrubbed away through the scented power of Palmolive.

Out in the locker rooms, the other men moved around, less dirty, or faster with their showers.

"Mitch?"

Cam ran his face under the shower spray long enough to clear his mouth of the dripping suds. "Shep?"

"Check the pumper when you're done, will you? Lorne's overseeing a couple of probies in the washdown and I've got a meeting with the arson cops."

He frowned through the water. "Meeting with the cops?"

"Yeah, they think there's something I have to see."

One of the other guys laughed, "If a cop like that little lady wanted to see me, I wouldn't be complaining, Shep. Even all got up in the gear, she was hot as that fire."

There were a few grunts of agreement and a handful of leering comments. Cam didn't join in. Sure, the woman had been a looker, but logic pointed out that she was a cop, even if she was arson, not street. And to go into a blazing structure took balls of steel, whether you were male or female.

Detective Teyla Emmagan might be hot, but Cam was willing to bet she wasn't a pushover - either on the beat or in bed. Plus, her partner might not look like much in the buff department, but he had a lean, wiry strength, and a slightly gamine look about him. Terry Halling might be a cop, but the smile and the glitter in his eyes suggested he might as easily have been in a line-up of serial killers if he'd chosen that kind of life.

Not a man whose lines Cam would cross lightly.

Cam rolled his head and listened to the bones in his neck crick.

"I'll save you some eggs," he told John as he ran his head under the spray and let the grime and soot of the previous night drain out of his scalp.

"Ah, not necessary. Dex is making pancakes. He'll save me a few." In spite of last night's fire, John's voice had a cheery sound to it, as it well might, considering Dex's pancakes were the biggest, lightest, fluffiest things a man would get to eat of outside of his gramma's house.

Exactly where a six-foot stud of a firefighter had learned to cook, no-one had yet managed to get out of the guy. Dex wasn't one for backstory.

Scrubbing out the suds, Cam listened to the chatter of the locker room with one ear.

"Pancakes? Damn that boy is domesticated."

"No shit. I heard he knows the arson cops."

"In the Biblical sense?"

Someone guffawed. "Both of them?"

"You know, she went in the structure like a pro," was someone else's comment.

"Hell, Dex says she _is_ a pro. Did time with his station out in Pegasus County before she went into arson investigation. He reckons she punches well above her weight."

"Well _well_ above her weight. If she's over one-forty, then my old lady's a size six."

By the time Cameron emerged from the showers, there were only a couple of guys still tying their laces. Most of them would head off home, having come off the evening shift, although a few would probably bunk down in one of the station dorms for a couple hours of shuteye.

Cam was tempted to be one of them.

It had been a hell of a night.

--

Cameron had a layer of eggs, bacon, and fluffy pancakes in his belly before he decided to interrupt whatever was going down between John and the cops.

Briefings were one thing, but an empty stomach after a night fighting fires was entirely another.

He snagged a handful of pancakes, and the butter and maple syrup John wouldn't eat them without (quite rightly so). A spoonful of scrambled eggs, an oily handful of bacon, and a cup of coffee as thick and black as John's own hair (although considerably less messy) finished off the plate.

"Maid Mitchell?" Bates asked, sitting back as Cam passed his table.

"Tips are more than welcome," Cameron told the guys with a grin and a shrug. "Shep's been at it for forty-five minutes and Dex said he didn't take anything in. I'm thinking he needs some fortification."

Plus, he was curious why the cops had called the meeting with John. Sure, John was one of the engine captains, but the arson cops had specified John. Tongues had wagged for a bit, especially after the lanky guy left his partner with John and went to talk to O'Neill in the man's office. They were still in there, apparently getting along fine from what Cam could see through the window.

The briefing room door was closed, but the inset window by its handle showed a serious information session in progress.

Paper notes and evidence bags littered the table. There were photos scattered across one corner, and an open laptop, as well as several notepads with broad scribbles over it. John was seated at the table staring down at some notes while the woman talked. Occasionally, he glanced up at something she said, and his gaze flickered across her features, resting first on her eyes, then her mouth, before travelling back up to her eyes again.

Cam knocked with his elbow, then used the elbow to lever the handle and his shoulder to shove the door open.

It looked like a serious information session was in progress.

The two faces that looked up from their study of the table seemed surprised to have been interrupted. John had a slight frown on his face, while the woman standing opposite him tilted her head in query, one hand paused in the act of reaching for an evidence bag.

Detective Teyla Emmagan had introduced herself much earlier this morning, her feet planted firmly in the dirt as she displayed her badge and explained her purpose at the still-going blaze - to go in and look at where the fire had been, how it had started. By the firelight, she'd seemed ferocious; in daylight, she seemed austere, with little of the previous night's urgency.

Then again, in daylight, she wasn't trying to convince a group of firefighters that she was capable of making her way through the still-burning school without succumbing to the heat or the smoke.

"I brought some breakfast for John," he said, although the explanation seemed redundant when he had a plate in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. "I, ahh, didn't know if you wanted some, Detective."

One tanned hand waved the offer away. "I am fine, thank you. Cameron Mitchell, is it?"

"Yeah. You can call me Cam. Or Mitch, if you prefer. I'd shake your hand, but it's full of coffee and eggs right now."

The corner of her mouth turned up at that and she turned to John, her expression polite. "We can break for a while, Captain Sheppard."

"I thought I already told you to call me John."

"If he's John, then I'm definitely Cam."

That earned him a full-blown laugh from her, and The Look from John - the narrow-eyed stare that was a warning for Cam to step back from the territory John was claiming.

Cam kept his most innocent expression in place as he handed off plate and mug. "You know, if you're hungry, detective, we've got a whole kitchen of food out there. And if he's stuffing his face, there's no reason you have to starve. In fact," he added, "considering that you were in there with us last night, I'd think you'd want something to hold you over."

Delicate brows arched and she turned to John. "Is he always like this?"

"Not to me he isn't," John said. The Look continued, and Cam blithely ignored it. In his place, John would have done exactly the same thing, although perhaps a little less blatant.

Detective Emmagan lips curved. The effect was pretty stunning in Cam's opinion, and judging how John paused with the plate on the table, he wasn't immune to it either. "I will get myself a cup of coffee, thank you."

"Hey, I can get it for you. Service with a smile..."

His eye fell on one of the evidence bags and was caught by the small white rectangle of a business card. The logo was a small red rhombus, bisected vertically and horizontally by white lines that blended into the card background. Against the rhombus, the company's name stood out in stark black, and in the middle of the card, boldly centred, the name leaped out at him, _David Sheppard._

He lifted his eyes to find the other two in the room looking at him. John's expression was tense, and the look he shot the detective suggested this was more than a briefing about a burned-out school.

Cam's eyes narrowed as he stared from one to the other.

"What the hell is going on here?"

--

John protested, of course.

Cameron didn't bother arguing with him. John wasn't the one with the information Cam wanted.

The only person in the room who could tell him what was going on was Detective Emmagan, and she was studying Cameron with a carefully expressionless face, her arms folded over her chest, her gaze never wavering from his.

"I believe he should know this," she said to John at last.

"It's my business!"

"Given your work, it may rapidly become his business, too," said the detective, her expression softening a little from its fierce lines as she looked at John. "And it is at my discretion that I brought this to you first and not your supervisor."

"He's not my supervisor."

"I don't think O'Neill's left the building yet," Cam said. "I can call him in and we can talk about this."

John glared at him, only pausing to turn that sharp hazel stare on the detective. Then he sat down in the chair, like a deflating hose. "All right," he said. "Lay it all out to him."

"You do realise that I will have to tell Commander O'Neill about this, Captain Sheppard," she said gently.

He set down his knife and fork and looked up at her, and Cam blinked. Once or twice, he'd seen John give that kind of intense look to someone he'd known for years and had been sleeping with for months - the steady, intense look beneath which most women dropped their eyes and blushed. The detective arched an eyebrow as the silence played out.

"Yeah, I know," John said at last, and if he didn't sound conciliatory, this was John they were talking about. He took the offensive, even when he was apologising. "You're doing your job."

"As would you if our situations were reversed."

John hesitated, then seemed to remember that they had an audience, because he glared at Cam. "Don't think you're going to get to tell me what to do."

"Don't think I'm going to sit by while you play your 'ronery' card," Cam retorted, before turning to Detective Emmagan. "What is it?"

She indicated the evidence bag. "We have seen indications that an arsonist has been targeting Captain Sheppard."

"John," said John, lifting a bacon laden fork to his mouth.

The detective ignored his interruption. "You would know of the Tweet and Kenneth Street fires. I understand that your crew attended the Kenneth Street fire?"

"Yeah." Cam remembered the Kenneth Street fire - a bad business. The lady who owned the house had lived there for nearly fifty years; luckily, at the time of the fire, she'd been out visiting her daughter up in Sacramento, but her house and just about everything she owned had burned - including her poodle and two parakeets she'd kept on the back veranda. "Mrs. Arslett."

Detective Emmagan leaned across the table and picked up a photo that showed a small wooden chest sturdily made, if not particularly fancy. It had been burned by the fire, its outer layer blistered and charred, but not consumed - which was strange, since wood - even treated wood - was usually the first to burn and the least likely to leave anything behind.

"That was one of the few things to come out of the fire that destroyed the rest of her house. It was made for her by one of the neighbourhood children she used to look after many years ago, and yet someone had taken pains to ensure that it survived since it had been soaked with a flame retardant."

Cam was frowning at the photo. It looked vaguely familiar, although he couldn't have said why.

It came to him in a rush. "That's your woodworking project from senior year."

John shrugged through a mouthful of butter and syrup pancake, chewed, and swallowed. "She used to mind my brother and I after school. Best ginger snap cookies on the planet."

"The chest was placed in the centre of the kitchen, on the tile. As you can see, it got singed but was otherwise undamaged." She pushed across another photo, this time the underside of the box and the tarnished plaque that said, _To Mrs. Arslett, from John Sheppard. Thanks for all the fish._

"Thanks for all the fish?"

Another shrug. "She put me onto Douglas Adams."

"Okay, so...this, the business card...what else?"

"A share promotion for Sheppard Industries was found tucked beneath the Hayes' doormat on Tweet Street. The house itself used to belong to a woman who worked as a housekeeper for Captain Sheppard's family."

"John."

The detective cocked an eyebrow at him and he lifted one shoulder in a shrug and dug his fork back into the eggs.

"And now the business card."

"It was left on the principal's desk in plain sight. A calling card." Detective Emmagan took out a sheaf of papers. "Mr. Wilmott, the principal, was one of the teachers many years ago. He keeps in regular contact with several of his...favourite students."

Cam's eyebrows nearly lifted off his forehead as he stared at John. "You keep in touch with your old teachers?"

"For the firefighting talks," said John. The emphasis was probably unnecessary, but Cam found it amusing all the same. "And...he was friendly."

There were a lot of ways to take that. Cam figured he'd ask for clarification. "Friendly?"

A pink flush slid up John's neck. "He was encouraging me to ask his daughter out."

"Irrespective of Mr. Wilmott's ultimate motives," said Detective Emmagan dryly, "He taught several of John's classes in his high school years, and, in addition to being the principal of John's old school, had the bonus - from the arsonist's perspective - of being someone close to John."

"Okay, wait a moment," Cam held up his hands. "If they're targeting people close to John, then why haven't they gone for his family?"

The detective didn't answer. She was busy shuffling through the papers on the table, filing them into piles. It was John who glanced at her, then answered Cam's question. "You know my family."

"They're still family."

"They're rich. Harder to get to."

"I don't know. I've thought about tossing a Molotov cocktail into your dad's office more than once."

"Cam, you're known to my dad's security detail. Plus, if you got them one of my dad's worse days, they'd probably offer you a light."

"Also," added Detective Emmagan, "the publicity that such an act generated - moving against the better-known members of the Sheppard family _would_ be a very public act - might detract from the arsonist's apparent goal."

"Which is what?"

"To get at Captain Sheppard in a personal, specific, and very direct way," she said, setting a wad of papers on the table and regarding both men. "To rattle his cage and taunt him. This is not a random set of attacks, this was planned and prepared. The targets were chosen with an eye to Captain Sheppard's personal history and his interactions with people, clues were left linking his family to the sites, and after this, he is likely to escalate."

"To what?"

She looked at John. "That is what I have been trying to determine with Captain Sheppard's help."

"You know, Teyla, it would be so much easier if you would call me by my name. One syllable rather than four, less time taken, less effort..."

"But then I should have to beat you off with a stick rather than keeping you at a distance with my feminine mystique," she retorted.

"If that's keeping him at a distance, then I think your feminine mystique might be broken," Cam told her, grinning. Then he sobered. "Seriously, though, how much danger is he in?"

"Don't even think about trying to cotton wool me, Mitch..."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Cam replied, matching John's tone. "I'd have a word to the Commander and let him apply the cotton wool." O'Neill was a crusty old grump, but he was protective of his people.

John straightened up. "No."

"Commander O'Neill will have to be told, in any case," said Detective Emmagan. "You are under his command, and as a target for this arsonist, you may become a liability."

"Thanks. A great way to make my day complete."

The detective brushed her fingers through her fringe, an absent-minded flick of her fingers through dark hair. "Captain, I hate to tell you this, but your day has only just begun."

--

Cam leaned back against the bar and took a swig of his Bud, letting the flavour wash out the remains of the day.

Across the bar, some singer yodelled on about the woman who'd walked into his life and stolen his pickup and his dog and his heart. Cam did his best not to listen as he waited for John to show up.

True to Detective Emmagan's words, it had been a long day.

"If you slump down any lower, you'll hit your head on the bar," John advised as he slipped into the empty chair next to Cam. "I thought my day was bad."

"You spent most of your day with Detective Emmagan," pointed out Cam. "I spent most of mine in panic and paperwork."

Between the paperwork for the high school fire, cleaning up the engines, being called out to deal with a four-car pile up on the interstate, and dealing with the meetings with John, O'Neill, and the arson cops, Cam had squeezed in enough time to take a half-hour nap during lunch before heading back to the paperwork with a ham and mustard in his hand.

"You didn't discover that a serial arsonist has you in their sites," retorted John, signalling a bartender and ordering a Coors. "That tends to take the shine out of your day."

"Did they throw anything up on a suspect list?"

John shrugged. "I've offended any number of people through the years."

"Enough for them to want to torch your old haunts?"

"Obviously at least one."

"You're just full of charm, Shep."

"Yeah, well, not enough to winkle a date out of the detective."

"Manage to persuade her to call you by name?"

The look on John's face said it all. Cam felt piqued. John had always managed to get the girls with little more than a smile and a diffident manner. Not that Cam had ever had difficulty with women, only that he usually had to exert himself.

"But you didn't manage to persuade her to come out to dinner?"

John's Coors came and he thanked the guy and took a swig. "Oh, I did. Then she discovered you were coming along and she backed out."

From the innocent look John gave him, Cam assumed he was joking. He chose not to comment on it at all. "So, we'll probably be seeing her and her partner around the place?"

"In and out this week." He sounded way too nonchalant for someone who'd just today discovered that someone had burned down his old high school just to make a point.

"Doesn't it worry you that there's a serial arsonist after you?"

John paused with the beer halfway to his lips, his eyes tracking a group of giggling women who were being shown to their table in the corner of the room. "For starters, he's not after me. Although Teyla thinks it's likely that he'll start escalating - particularly now that I've been made aware of him."

"And you've got no idea who this guy is?"

"Not yet." John shrugged. "Like I said, there's a bunch of people I've offended over the years. Including my own family."

Cam snorted into the mouth of his beer bottle. John's family wouldn't stoop to arson - hell, they didn't even raise their voices in a fight. While Cam's parents had occasionally argued, raising their voices in clear anger towards each other, it'd always been a healthy anger - out in the open and later forgiven. The Sheppards had been polite - freezingly so. It was no wonder John had intimacy issues with a family like that.

He took a long drink, swallowed, and felt like cheering as the yodeller up on stage finished his song. Not because it was good, but because it was over at last.

Meanwhile, John was still talking. "Teyla will work it out. She doesn't seem like the type to let something go once she's got a hold of it."

"Hm, I wonder who that reminds me of."

John rolled his eyes, and surveyed the rapidly-filling tables along the window - the ones where food was served. "I could do with a steak."

He was changing the topic. Cam knew that perfectly well. On the other hand, his buddy had had a long day. And a steak dinner sounded good. It wasn't as though Cameron had anything worth eating in his fridge. Plus, he figured, nonchalance or not, John could do with company.

What was there to go home to anyway?

--

Cam woke out of a deep sleep to an uncomfortable vibrating sensation against his thigh.

Someone was calling the cellphone he'd forgotten to take out of his jeans when he stumbled back into his apartment after dinner and flopped down on the bed. Insistently, too.

With a groan, he rolled off his stomach, wondering why his throat felt so dry after he'd had a half-dozen beers, and why he could smell smoke...

_Smoke? The fuck?_

Adrenaline rolled him off the bed and into a crouch on the floor as blood pounded in his temples at the same pace as the hammering on the door of his apartment. He took two steps towards the door and a wave of heat swept over him.

He nearly choked on the smoke - wood and paper ash, melting plastics, underpinned by the stringent bite of chemical solvents - and stumbled to one side of the door to catch his breath and get some boots on.

Accelerants, zigzagging trailers across his apartment floor, an open window, cooking oil over the kitchen counters and flammable chemicals on the floor... His living room was a hell of blistering flame, burning smoke, and stinging ash, and there'd be no crossing the room to the front door, let alone getting out.

Someone had wanted Cameron Mitchell to become a crispy critter.

He was determined not to be give them the pleasure.

The phone - no longer vibrating - was in his hand and he called emergency with it, even as his eyes darted around his bedroom, adopting and discarding possibilities in moments.

The bedroom window opened out to a drop of about twenty yards - too far to fall without breaking something, and the bathroom window wasn't much better except for the handy addition of a paling fence at the bottom of the twenty-yard drop. If the Department came in time, then Cam might be able to jump out the window...

If.

He could already hear the distant whine of the engines on their way; but the fire was licking at his door. A trailer appeared to have been left leading into his room - cushion stuffing - but a gust of wind had rolled it over to the wall where it was happily smouldering, not having quite reached flashpoint.

Cam closed the door against the fire - it would take longer for the fire to reach him that way, and would avoid a cross-draft...

Unless, of course, the kitchen window was open. Which it probably was.

He refused to think about all the things the arsonist would have done, how the man had gotten into Cam's apartment, why he hadn't killed him or drugged him or something to stop him from waking up, how furious John was gonna be when he got out of here.

Tessellated tile rang beneath his boots as he began filling the bathtub full of water. He didn't have much by way of buckets in here - his buckets were all in the laundry, which was off the kitchen, which was on the other side of the apartment and on fire. But he had his blankets, which was something to wrap himself in as he tried to work out a way out of here.

He dumped the blankets in the still-running bath to soak, then went to hunt out one of his fireproof jackets and a woollen beanie for his head. He was still in the jeans and cotton tee he'd been in the previous night, so that was okay, and his boots were solid - once he laced them up.

Smoke was wisping up from beneath the door, a few tendrils seeped in around the top. He dreaded to think of how smoky it'd be in there.

Outside, he could hear shouts; someone bellowing his name - that would be old Mr. Hirsch from Number 12, who had a voice like a sergeant major on parade. Cam figured he could try bellowing back, but he didn't think his voice was up to it. His throat felt raw from the smoke, and he took a moment to find one of his grandpa's old hankies, damp it, and tie it around his face.

He dragged the blanket from the tub, and dumped it on the floor, ignoring the wash of water towards the bedroom carpet. Several towels went next.

A sudden distant din caught his attention - someone was battering at his front door. No, not battering - chopping through it. He could hear the crack of the wood splintering beneath the blows. His bedroom door was warm, but not too hot to touch just yet, and he flung the heavy, damp blanket around his shoulders, and dragged up the wet towels, prepared to use them to beat out any flames in his way.

He took a deep breath behind the already-drying kerchief, wrapped a towel around his hand and grabbed the handle of the door.

He yanked it open, swept the first of the wet towels across the floor to clear it, and stepped into hell.

Smoke roiled and coiled in the room, filling it almost completely. He could just see the outlines of his furniture and his room through the smoke and flames, and dragged the damp towels with him across the burning floor. The carpet had melted into sticky strands with the heat, and the towels hissed as he crawled across the floor.

Then he saw it.

The photo frame had been laid down in a bare patch of carpet. From the look of the carpet around it, compared with elsewhere, water that had been poured over and around the frame to preserve it long enough for someone to see it, to get the message that had been intended by its presence.

The crash of an axe through the door broke his concentration.

"Mitchell!" John was roaring through the gap. "Mitchell!"

"I'm here," he rasped, his voice indistinct through the smoke and the kerchief. He dragged it down, ignoring the blistering blast of heat as the flames leaped towards the new air source for a moment, then continued their steady consumption of his living room. "I'm here, I'm okay. Wet blanket, damp towels."

The sound of more axes hacking at the lock, and the distant syllables of grumbling. "Why the fuck did you have to get such a solid door?"

"So you'd stop kicking it in when you came over drunk and depressed," Cam retorted.

A moment later, the door was shoved open and John clambered in, suited, tanked, masked. "Jesus, buddy. Let's get you out of here. Lorne, wait until we're out, then start the cool down!"

Shadowy figures, bulky and male, crowded at the door with the hose in their arms. A smaller figure moved past them, fearless in her confrontation of the fire, her head turning this way and that as she peered through the smoke, looking for the signs of the arsonist.

But John was half-dragging Cam out of there, hauling him towards the door.

"Wait!" Cam pulled back, ducked across the room and grabbed the photo frame, then hissed as the metal burned his fingers. He shoved it into the damp blankets and then let John usher him out into the stairwell with a steel grip on his arm.

Then they were out in the street, standing in the cool night lit by the flashing lights of the engine and the flickering lights coming from his windows. On the sidewalk, the neighbours were gawking and gasping with every hiss and billow of smoke from the broken-paned windows, children huddling up against their parents as they stared in mute awe and terror at the fire consuming that one apartment.

"Everyone's out?"

"They think so. Couldn't rouse the guy in the apartment above yours - but one of the neighbours said he'd gone away, so we think it's okay." Even out in the street, John wasn't letting him go - he steered Cam around towards the EMTs waiting with their ambulance.

Oh, God, no. Cameron tried to back away, but the arm around his back held him fast. "Did I mention I'm fine?"

"How about you let the EMTs be the judge of that," said John, loud enough so the nearer woman turned around.

Cam stared at her. She surveyed him from head to toe, then arched a brow.

"I see that hell spat you back out again, Cam," said Carolyn Lam in her usual cool tones. "What's the damage?"

"Noth--"

"Smoke inhalation, fire burn," John shot Cameron a glare. "General pigheadedness when it comes to admitting he was injured..."

"Oh, like you can talk?" Cam retorted.

"Unfortunately," said the other EMT, a petite woman with a husky drawl of a voice, "there's no cure for male ego."

In the light from the ambulance's inside, Cam could see Carolyn's smile plainly enough. "All right," she said, brandishing a tongue depressor. "Say 'ah,' Cam. And when we're done, you'll get some cold water."

John jerked a finger back at the apartment. "I'm going back in to check on the others," he said. "If I don't find you waiting here when I get back..."

"I'll get a spanking?"

"Only if you're good," said John.

Cam opened his mouth to retort, then caught Carolyn's raised eyebrow and shut up. He let the EMTs take the photo frame and the blanket, and put them aside, and submitted meekly to the medical check.

An hour later, wearing a woollen sweater dug out of one of the engines, and wrapped in an ambulance blanket, Cameron was relieved to see the returning figures of the firefighters, grubby, smoky, ashy, but alive. No deaths today, although there'd been an injury when one of the probies accidentally gashed himself on broken glass.

Detective Emmagan had questioned him once she'd come out of the house, her expression grim and her answers direct when Cam asked his own questions about the fire.

John came over as soon as he'd dumped his equipment. "What's the damage?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

"Your place is a mess, there are clothes all over your bedroom floor, and I'm pretty sure that unless you like charcoal and ash-grey, you'll be redecorating." Streetlight sheened icy off black hair as he turned to glance back at the apartment, his mouth and jaw set in grim lines. "He tried to kill you."

"He failed." Cam said the words with as much calm as he could manage, given that his apartment was ashes and he'd come close to being roasted alive.

"This time," said John, turning back and resting his hands on his hips. "What the hell did you go back for?"

He'd been cradling the photo frame he'd taken from the burning apartment. "He wanted us to see this."

John took the frame from his hands and stared at it for a long moment, very still.

It showed two young men in graduating robes, arms around each other's shoulders, grinning like they had the whole world before them. And they had, then. The black-haired one would go on to work in his father's firm before he realised he'd never please his family or the wife he'd married, and chosen his own path. The brown-haired would start in the military, until the death of his parents required him to give up his dreams of flight and fight and settle down close to his gramma.

Eventually, they'd both ended up in the company.

Twenty years of friendship, and a fire that had come dangerously close to putting it out.

Cam saw John's stillness, and averted his gaze, aware that his friend was struggling with hard emotions. John wasn't good with his feelings; that was okay - that was why he had Cam: to draw him out and connect him with others on a deeper level.

Without Cam, John would be left adrift, in more ways than one.

"Hey," he said, trying to be comforting. "It's over."

John made a noise of disagreement as he looked up from the photograph. "No," he said, looking back at the gently-smoking apartment window, his mouth set in a grim line. "It's only just begun."

Cam waited a beat, then asked lightly, "Do you want me to start singing The Carpenters?"

For a moment, it looked like John didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Do you want to sleep on the street tonight?"

"Right now, I'd sleep anywhere." He glanced over to where Detective Emmagan was talking with her partner. "Go ask your fire cop if I can go now, or if they need me for further questioning."

John rolled his eyes as he handed the photo back. "She's not my fire cop."

Cam grinned. This was more like it. "Just ask if I can go home with you."

"Mommy, may I?"

"Whatever works for you, Shep."

The other man's expression was sour. "You've got a smart mouth on you, Mitch."

But there was a smile on John's lips as he turned away.

- **fin** -


End file.
